Strategic Account Manager – AI Infrastructure Sales

Western Digital•San Jose, CA

5d•$129,600 - $172,800•Onsite

About The Position

This role is central to Western Digital’s AI Infrastructure growth strategy, focused on driving datacenter storage adoption across a defined set of strategic platform and infrastructure customers. The Strategic Account Manager is a quota-carrying seller responsible for owning account strategy, expanding multi-year platform opportunities, and converting architectural alignment into repeatable revenue. This role requires the ability to operate at the intersection of infrastructure platforms, software-defined storage, and data lifecycle architectures while navigating complex buying centers. This role will focus on strategic software-defined storage, data protection, hybrid cloud, HCI, scale-out platform providers, and infrastructure software companies. The role is expected to understand each customer’s architecture, roadmap, appliance or platform strategy, and long-term capacity growth model, then align WD technologies to their product, qualification, and go-to-market priorities.

Requirements

8–12+ years in datacenter, cloud, or infrastructure sales
Experience selling into platform providers and infrastructure vendors
Experience selling to or partnering with data protection, HCI, hybrid cloud, scale-out file, or software-defined storage platform companies
Proven success managing complex sales cycles
Background selling solution-based offerings
Experience introducing new infrastructure technologies into strategic accounts, including technical positioning, customer qualification, and adoption planning
Architecture-led solution selling
Strategic account planning
Understanding of backup, recovery, cyber resilience, HCI, scale-out file, hybrid cloud, and software-defined storage architectures
Executive engagement and communication
Cross-functional influence
Complex deal execution
Business and financial acumen
New technology introduction and customer adoption planning
Pipeline and forecast discipline

Responsibilities

Develop and execute multi-year account plans aligned to platform refresh cycles, customer buying centers, and long-term revenue growth
Maintain a high-confidence pipeline, drive forecast accuracy, and manage execution cadence across strategic opportunities
Position WD storage within software-defined and AI data architectures by translating workload requirements into infrastructure, scalability, and cost value
Engage customer engineering and product teams to drive design-in, validation, platform standardization, and future roadmap influence
Build senior stakeholder relationships and communicate WD’s value tied to scalability, cost, and long-term platform advantage
Own large, multi-stakeholder opportunities and lead negotiation through close across global organizations
Develop account strategies tailored to software-defined storage, data protection, HCI, hybrid cloud, and scale-out file platform providers
Identify where WD technologies improve platform economics, density, performance-per-watt, retention cost, and long-term capacity scaling
Build relationships across product management, hardware engineering, qualification, supply chain, procurement, alliances, and executive stakeholders
Drive WD technology qualification into customer appliances, reference architectures, validated solutions, and future platform releases
Convert roadmap alignment into design wins, repeatable platform revenue, and long-term supply commitments
Introduce and position new WD datacenter technologies, including UltraSMR, high-capacity HDD platforms, advanced firmware capabilities, and emerging storage innovations
Identify customer workloads and architectures where new technologies deliver measurable cost, density, power, and scalability advantages
Drive early technical engagement with customer architecture, engineering, qualification, and product teams
Coordinate internal alignment across sales, product, engineering, marketing, and supply chain to support customer adoption
Build customer-specific adoption plans from technical education to proof of concept, qualification, platform integration, and volume deployment
Translate customer feedback into roadmap input for future WD products and platform requirements

Benefits

paid vacation time
paid sick leave
medical/dental/vision insurance
life, accident and disability insurance
tax-advantaged flexible spending and health savings accounts
employee assistance program
supplemental life and AD&D
legal plan
pet insurance
critical illness, accident and hospital indemnity
tuition reimbursement
transit
the Applause Program
employee stock purchase plan
WD Savings 401(k) Plan
Short Term Incentive Plan (“STI Plan”)
Sales Incentive Plan (“SIP”)
Long-Term Incentive (LTI) program (restricted stock units (RSUs) or cash equivalents)
RSU awards for eligible new hires